Bid Of A Space Tyrant Volume 1 : Refugee (original 1985; edition 1988)

In this third installment of the Space Tyrant biography, our hero, Hope Hubris, gets kidnapped and memory-wiped in an effort to cause him to lose the election for President of Jupiter. Of course, the plot fails and Hope wins the popular election for President. Of course, nothing's ever quite that easy for our hero...

Unfortunately, Piers starts to fall into his old ways again. There's a few pages of interesting banter and back-and-forth between Thorley and Hope. Then things start to devolve. Piers replicates the USA on Jupiter but instead of providing real state names the states are referred to by their mottos: Florida == Sunshine; California == Golden; New Hampshire == Granite. And then within Sunshine, Piers mangles the city names: Ami for Miami, Hassee for Tallahassee, Ybor for... something. I still haven't figured that out. And then there's Ganymede with it's Jupiterian base called Tanamo - for Guantanamo. It's that kind of shortcut taking that frustrates me about the later books in Piers' series. He starts off with a relatively good concept and then gets lazy with it and falls back to his old Xanth-like ways. He did that with the Incarnations of Immortality, the Adept Series, and the Space Tyrant series.

Of course, I'll finish off the series but my hopes are fading quickly.... ( )

BIO OF A SPACE TYRANT

I knew from the start that the alleged SF setting was a thin veneer over our contemporary world, but this book is where it jumps the shark. Our hero goes on a tour of the United States of Jupiter, which is exactly like the USA in both political and geographical details. These correspondences were okay in the first two books, where they stayed in the background of an otherwise interesting story, but here they take center stage and far too much words are wasted on this assault on the reader's credulity. ( )

This is the third book in the Bio of a Space Tyrant series (following Refugee and Mercenary). I picked this series up on a whim when it was cheap in a bookstore sale, and liked the first two books, although the first was quite grim and the second a little odd. This book isn't as strong as the other two, and it took longer to read than usual because of that... I guess the plot just seemed even harder to believe than the others in the series.

http://www.stillhq.com/book/Piers_Anthony/Bio_of_a_Space_Tyrant_Politician.html ( )

Good honest killer becomes good dishonest killer.

A useful military type, Hope also has enemies, and they decide to do something about him. Now not an easy guy to mess with, he manages to extricate himself from that situation, and he continues to build his power base, this time in the political arena.

http://notfreesf.blogspot.com/2007/07/bio-of-space-tyrant-politician-piers.html ( )